Keep
I don’t see it as a word anymore spell out every letter enunciate every syllable begging for kinship from a word so distant, like your grandmother’s saris, the one in the pictures where she smiles unaware of being photographed woven in Banaras, home to poverty and colour, eyes wandering from
Desire in Love
I waxed fiction out of reality at a young age, after my father gave me advice for dealing with life’s vicissitudes: “Pretend you’re the protagonist in a story. Create a world around you to make you feel less alone.” When my family moved from Indiana to Texas, I transformed our new town into
Rubber Fire
Horizon catches the cap of our neighbour’s fire oiling gashes through wood floorboards spiked with old plimsolls. The deadliness is in the sunsink behind the flames: in things suspended there is so much space quivering from absence into being. Strange faith. I tap your shoulder to ma
Observances
I was staring at the spidery print and into the fresh whiteness of my copy of Beowulf one Friday evening last September, while far away and unbeknownst to me, tales older and stranger had begun to sprawl inside my phone. A reticent but attentive member of an English freshers’ Facebook group, I scr
because my mother’s best friend is catholic
today it seems the missionaries are bound to send their best-disguised recruit – the tickle of hair on your top lip better found at the wheel of a Ford F-150, camo drying on the boot, but filters the word of G-d to a tinny sound a frequency between carrie underwood and orchestral flute, cou
Cinema
My grandparents came from a movie-going age – he would call from the office and my grandmother would dress all her children in evening clothes, and wait. At the cinema, the world dissolved into light and sound, the salt of popcorn on your fingertips, and pink soda that fizzed up your nose,
The Lakebed
In a riverless city, the promise of water is enough. My mother and I pin our hopes to each monsoon, and evenings in June that stroll the circumference of our bayou-to-be. Starved of fish, the empty lake harbours cattle, gangs of dogs and cricket games — we see snatches of batsmen thr
Leaf Racing
My sister Lena was a mess when Funtown Playland let her go. Two months of playing Princess Thistle in their daytime production – and nothing. She came home in street clothes with her gaudy yellow dress crumpled to her chest. Back when Lena first moved into my spare room, I hoped Funtown Playland w